10 Takeaways from Our 2026 Agency New Business Conference

If you attended our virtual new business conference for small and mid-sized agencies, you know there was no shortage of practical, hard-won advice for agency owners and new business teams.

And if you missed it, we put together an initial 10 takeaways from the conference; specific things you can take back to your firm and start using this week.

1. Pick your archetype and say it everywhere.

AI search engines don’t reward optionality.

If you’re trying to be a Brand and Story Architect, an Integrated Growth Engine, and a Specialist Innovator all at once, you’re making it harder for prospects and AI platforms to understand “who you are”.

Pick a primary identity, commit to it, and repeat it consistently across your site, content, and outreach.

Pattern dominance is how you get found and remembered. (And Pattern Dominance really should be a metal band BTW)

2. Your homepage needs to declare, not tease.

Vague positioning forces AI search engines to rely on weaker downstream signals when they’re trying to categorize your agency.

If a prospect lands on your homepage and still can’t tell what kind of agency you are in under 10 seconds, you run the risk of losing them.

Homepage language carries the heaviest narrative weighting in AI-mediated search, so treat that real estate like the most important thing you’ve got.

Lead with who you are and who you serve.

3. Stop sending emails in bulk and start sending them with relevance.

One of the clearest points from Day 2 was that volume without relevance is just noise.

Prospecting emails should be short, specific to the recipient, and written like one professional reaching out to another.

Using AI to help draft is fine, and in fact, helpful, but run it through a human lens before it goes out, because prospects can tell when something was written by AI.

4. Your prospect list isn’t a project. It’s a program.

The agencies winning new business aren’t building a list once and calling it done.

Create a manageable goal: add roughly 40 companies every five to six weeks, re-clean the data regularly, and treat your database as a long-term asset.

If you’re only pulling a list when you “need names,” you’re already behind.

Building a list-management cadence into your regular workflow is one of the highest-leverage things a biz dev team can do.

5. Case studies should prove your positioning, not just your outcomes.

AI platforms treat case studies as behavioral validation, meaning they’re checking whether your claimed identity actually shows up in your real work.

A case study that just says “we increased conversions by 30%” doesn’t tell AI or your prospects what kind of agency you are.

Reframe your case studies to show your method, your point of view, and why your specific approach produced the result.

That’s what builds interpretive confidence.

6. When prospects go quiet, most of the time it isn’t personal.

Status quo bias, internal blockers, unclear next steps, and just being slammed are the real reasons prospects ghost you.

The 30-Day Win Back framework we shared on Day 3 gave attendees a structured, respectful way to re-engage, with 6 to 10 touchpoints across multiple channels over a month.

The key is to rotate channels, lead with value instead of check-ins, and always give them an easy out.

Bringing one stalled opportunity back to life a quarter can change your pipeline.

7. Thought leadership content doesn’t have to start with a podcast.

Sam Littlefield and Steve Roop from Littlefield Agency gave us a masterclass in creating and repurposing thought leadership content on Day 5, but the bigger lesson was that the format matters less than the consistency.

If you’ve got a real sales conversation that keeps surfacing the same prospect pain point, that’s a content topic.

A single well-developed idea should produce four to six assets across formats, whether you’re starting with a written article, a short video, or a structured case study.

8. Titles and roles matter more than seniority when it comes to targeting.

It’s tempting to aim only for the CEO or CMO, but the people who actually drive evaluation and vendor selection are often functional buyers and director-level influencers who aren’t as hard to reach.

Building a prospect list that accounts for economic buyers, functional buyers, and operational contributors gives you more points of entry and more opportunities to build relationships before a formal review ever starts.

Review and adjust your title targets every six to twelve months, because they shift.

9. Thought leadership works in sales follow-up, not just marketing.

One of the most practical ideas from Day 5 was that you can record a short episode inspired by a specific prospect conversation and then send it to that prospect as a follow-up touchpoint.

It may feel  like “too much”, but don’t be hesitant to do this.

It’s personalized, it’s relevant, and it reinforces that you were actually listening during the meeting.

Prospects respond to that because it doesn’t feel like a form letter.

If you’ve got any kind of content engine, you can put it to work in your new business pipeline directly.

10. Consistency beats cleverness in the long run.

Whether it was list-building, thought leadership, or ghosted prospect re-engagement, every session of the week came back to the same core truth:

The agencies winning at new business aren’t necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated tools or the most creative outreach. They’re the ones who show up every week with a clear positioning, a warm, human tone, and a process they actually follow.

Start with where you are, build habits around what you can sustain, and improve from there.